Tag Archives: Ronny Cox

Three male friends (Ronny Cox, Art Hindle, Tim Maier) decide to challenge themselves by running through a 72-mile span of the New Mexico desert. Along the way they come into contact with a right-wing militia known as The Citizen’s Brigade that is headed by Colonel Crouse (M. Emmet Walsh). Initially the military unit toys with the runners making them a part of their exercise, but when one of the runner’s insults their members things turn ugly and the three friends find themselves running for their lives amidst the harsh terrain and from soldiers better conditioned to handle the elements.

The script, which was written by Ronny Cox and his wife Mary, has such a stupid premise that it’s hard to take any of it seriously. Aren’t there parks or a contained outdoor survival course that the men could take where they could still prove how ‘tough’ they were without throwing themselves into the barren wide-open desert? The men bring along NO FOOD, I repeat NO FOOD is brought along on this 72-mile trek by foot and their water bottles are so puny that they wouldn’t last them 10 miles let alone 70. These suicidal men don’t need a nutty right-wing militia to end their lives as they seem quite capable of doing it just fine all by themselves.

The second-half drags as the runners evade the militia while occasionally coming into contact with them and having very fake looking fights. The militia members are extreme caricatures that border on unintentional camp and Walsh, who has had a great career playing colorful character roles, is not effective as the menacing colonel

The climactic finish in which a large crowd of observers stand at the finish line waiting for the three runners to appear has to be the dumbest part of the movie. Why are all these people so excited to see who wins when they hadn’t seen any part of the race as it was run nor where there when it began? Who’s sponsoring this race and where the participants required to sign a legal waiver before they joined? What kind of a race has no checkpoints that the runners are forced to pass through to make sure that they hadn’t cheated? What’s to say they couldn’t have jumped into a car when no one was looking and drove the whole way and then when they neared the finish line they simply got out of the car and acted like they had run it when they really hadn’t?

Watching the men hobble to the finish looking all beaten down from their self-imposed foray into the harsh desert didn’t seem ‘courageous’ at all, but instead incredibly moronic. A better title for this film would be RAW INSANITY.

Captain Paul Blanchard (Charlton Heston) is on his final submarine mission, but just as the vessel surfaces it gets struck by a Norwegian freighter, which sinks it to the ocean bottom. The navy’s rescue team is unable to get to the crew due to a rock slide that covers the escape hatch. Eccentric Navy Captain Gates (David Carradine) is brought in as he has created a submersible vehicle that can go down the depths of the ocean and remove the rocks from the sub, but his personality clashes with that of Captain Bennett’s (Stacy Keach), which further hampers the rescue efforts.

The story, which is based on the 1971 novel ‘Event 1000’ by David Lavallee gets off to a shaky start. Although the interiors of the vessel look quite authentic the exterior shots, especially those showing the crew sticking their heads outside the vessel’s port hatch, were clearly done on a soundstage in front of a green screen and nothing is worse than a film that tries hard to be meticulous in one area only to compromise in another. When the sub gets hit many of the crew, which were made up of stunt men and not professional actors, overreact giving it an unintentionally comical feel.

The cutting back and forth to scenes inside the Norwegian ship and how that crew becomes panicked was not necessary. Again, the acting gets a bit over-the-top here too and the dialogue is shown in subtitles due to them speaking in their native language. It might’ve actually added to the intrigue had we not seen what went wrong with the other ship to cause the collision especially since the focus of the film is on the rescue effort anyways.

Once the rescue gets going it gets better with a solid pace that keeps things on a realistic level and continues to throw in new twists that makes the attempted rescue continually more difficult. Although it does get to a point where it seems nightmarish scenarios are introduced simply for the sake of drama and almost like it was piling-on the problems making the submarine crew look like they were the most unluckiest people on the planet in order to have one bad luck situation happen after another.

The scenes involving Carradine and his relationship with his pal Mickey (Ned Beatty) as well as his animosity with Stacy Keach are more interesting than the ones involving the crew stuck in the ship. Part of the reason is there is no backstory given to any of the characters, so we never see them as three dimensional people and our empathy for their welfare isn’t as much as it could’ve been. A brief bit shows the wives of the crew upset at the news, but an added side-story would’ve helped. In fact I was genuinely shocked that Rosemary Forsyth, who plays Heston’s wife, has only a single line of dialogue. I realize she may not be an A-list star, but she has a respectable enough body of work to expect something more than a just a token walk-on bit and I’m surprised she took the part.

Spoiler Alert!

The ending is tense and filmed in a way that you’ll never realize that the subs used were simply miniaturized models shot on a soundstage with smoked used for the underwater effects. However, the drama could’ve been heightened especially when one of the characters sacrifices their life to save the others, which should’ve come off as a shock, but the film telegraphs it, which lessens the effect.

End of Spoiler Alert!

Heston’s a stiff acting doesn’t always work, but here he’s excellent and despite being well over 50 appears amazingly young and agile. This marks Christopher Reeve’s film debut who looks absolutely boyish as well as a reunion of sorts for Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox who starred together 6 years earlier in Deliverance although here they do not share any scenes together.

Christopher Walken plays James Reese a veteran of the Vietnam War who has issues with aggression. After numerous arrests he gets shipped off to a hospital in Europe run by Dr. Frederick (Joss Ackland) and overseen by a U.S. General (Ralph Meeker). There they do tests on the patients by implanting special devices into their brains that connects to their pleasure centers and can quell their aggressive behavior by having them feel a pleasurable sensation every time a button is pressed from a remote.

Walken’s performance is outstanding and Ronny Cox as his fellow patient is also quite good especially the part where he has the device implanted into his own brain, which turns him into a sad, pathetic, child-like state. Bette Henritze gives an interesting performance as well as a naïve, middle-aged nurse hired to make the patient’s stay more ‘happy’ by supplying them with books and board games only to be attacked and raped by Cox and then forced to play a game of checkers with him afterwards.

The story, which was based on a play by Dennis Reardon, certainly has its moments. In fact I was surprised how caught up into I got since the production values are close to appalling. The film was shot in Denmark in a building that looks like it was formerly a rundown mansion converted into a makeshift hospital for the sake of the movie. It all looks embarrassingly cheap and the idea of having a big hospital with a full-time staff and even a barbed wire fence and guard dogs, but only three patients is quite hard to believe.

Had the budget been bigger it might’ve been able to reach a broader audience. Bernard Girard’s direction is okay for the limitations that he was given, but the film’s faded, grainy stock and overall amateurish look becomes a turn off from the beginning and something that it cannot overcome. The plot itself is interesting, but the concept has been filmed before and with better results.